Weekend roundup: Gulf's baby fish may have 'dodged a bullet' in oil spill

Early results from an annual count of juvenile fish in grass beds scattered around the northern Gulf of Mexico suggest that the larvae of some species survived the oil spill in large numbers, according to the scientists involved. “My preliminary assessment, it looks good, it looks like we dodged a bullet. In terms of the numbers of baby snapper and other species present in the grass beds, things look right,” said Joel Fodrie, a researcher with the University of North Carolina’s Institute of Marine Science who has been studying seagrass meadows along the coast for five years.

Advertising firm Red Square's billing is up about 500 percent since 2005 to about $50 million a year, president Rich Sullivan said. Clients are headquartered in 11 states, including Texas, New York and Illinois. So far this year, profit is up 120 percent from last year, Sullivan said. Advancements in communication technology have played a large role in allowing a Mobile company to gain national clout in way that wouldn’t have been possible 10 or 20 years ago, Sullivan said.

In the latest installment in our Tracking the Claims series, we check in with oil spill victims with whom we've spoken over the past five months. Some people have received payments, but many more are waiting to hear on theirs.

Baldwin County District Attorney Judy Newcomb said she may go before a judge to seek tighter constraints on the comings and goings of murder suspect Stephen Nodine, after reports surfaced Friday that the former Mobile County commissioner was recently spotted in an electronics store. Nodine, who also faces a federal charge of possession of a gun while addicted to drugs, is under house arrest and is being monitored by federal probation officials.

Oil spill claims czar Ken Feinberg said Saturday that he is seeing enough consistency in business claims that he will give owners more benefit of the doubt when reviewing their finances, which he said should result in bigger checks and faster payments. After a month of reviewing claims, Feinberg said he has noticed businesses in the same industry are making similar assumptions when calculating losses. For example, he cited the importance that beach businesses place on summer income. Up to this point, Feinberg said, his adjusters at the Gulf Coast Claims Facility were reviewing each claim on its own, and may not have agreed with those assumptions. Now he will be clustering claims by industry and applying the same formula to each claim.

At Mobile Regional Airport Saturday afternoon, Tammy Matthews could hardly contain her emotions. For the last eight months, her son, Lance Cpl. Brian Hill, 20, of Fairhope, had been in Afghanistan with the U.S. Marines.
Along with three other Mobile-based Marine reservists, Hill was finally — safely — on his way home.
“We got through,” said Matthews, anxiously checking, and double-checking, the airport monitor for her son’s arriving flight, “with a lot of hope and prayers.”